This brilliant interview, from which I have excerpted only the portions directly related to education, was conducted by David Cayley in September, 1988 for the CBC Radio program, Ideas. My thanks to both Cayley and Ivan Illich for their generous permission to rework the original material as I saw fit.
A note about David Cayley:
A native of Toronto, Canada, and a writer/broadcaster at CBC radio for many years, Cayley first met Ivan Illich when he traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1969 to attend his seminars on the emerging issue of so-called third world development. He has maintained an ongoing relationship with Illich ever since. It is Cayley's depth of understanding of Illich both as a great thinker of the twentieth century and as a human being that enabled Cayley to translate the contents of an extremely complex mind into laymen's terms.
Editors note:
It was actually my request to interview Illich for SKOLE - which he refused on the grounds of a life-long distaste for interviews and his failing health - along with my asking Illich for comment on the manuscript for my upcoming book, Making It Up As We Go Along: the Story of the (Albany) Free School, which resulted in an invitation last October to meet with the man who has had such a profound influence on my own ideas on education for the past twenty-odd years.
I arrived in State College, Pennsylvania, on a glorious Indian Summer afternoon. Ivan Illich greeted me warmly with a generous smile and a great, bony hug. Without hesitation, his right-hand man and companion of thirty years, Professor Lee Hoinacki (quite a story in himself), invited me into the small international circle of men and women who gather around Illich when he teaches at Penn State University each Fall.
Although he's presently suffering through the final stages of a slow-growing cancer on the right side of his otherwise beautifully aging face - an illness doctors predicted he would succumb to over ten years ago - Illich continues to teach, both formally and informally, seven days a week. He remains an intense bundle of intellectual energy in spite of the physical pain which is at times quite apparent. Illich is a teacher in the most classical sense of the word: he loves his subject and his students with equal fervor.
Once I recovered from the shock of seeing up close the enormous tumor disfiguring his jawline, what impressed me immediately about Illich was the ecstatic look of an almost boyish delight which overtakes his expression as he shares his latest ideas. At seventy, he has largely left behind the work of analyzing contemporary cultural patterns of thought and perception, which occupied him throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, in order to develop what he calls a philosophy of history.
Over a long weekend at the university, I had the privilege of sitting in on both a classroom lecture and the much less structured weekend sessions in his office. Arriving from Albany just in time for the end of one of his weekly Friday afternoon "wrap-up" seminars, I was practically bowled over in the doorway by both the heat and the energy emanating from that crowded room, one from which the participants seemed in no hurry to depart. The following morning I would encounter a very different atmosphere as I joined a dozen or so of Illich's closest associates sitting in a ring on the floor of his threadbare office while he led us in a wide-ranging discussion.
Meanwhile, it was in State College where I first learned of the Cayley interview. My host, a professor of economics at neighboring Bucknell University, had all of Illich's books in his personal library, including the most recent, David Cayley's Ivan Illich In Conversation, which I had never seen before. The book combines a very true-to-the-original transcription of Cayley's exhaustive five-day interview with Illich with an extraordinarily comprehensible sixty-page synopsis of the life's work of this incredible scholar.
Reading Cayley's book late into my first night in State College, it became clear to me almost immediately that, even with Illich's cooperation, there was no way I could ever have come close to conducting an interview with such depth and breadth. Thus what follows is my heavily edited version of the original, which I encourage everyone to obtain and read in its entirety (copies can be obtained from:
Excerpts from Cayley's introduction:
In 1938, when he was twelve years old, Ivan Illich walked through the vineyards on the outskirts of Vienna and smelled the fetid wind that, in a few days, would bring Hitler's troops into Austria and change his world forever. He knew then, he told me, that he would never give children to his grandfather's house. This house had stood on its island in the Adriatic off the coast of Dalmatia since the Middle Ages. It had seen rulers come and go, and empires rise and fall, but daily life had scarcely changed in the intervening centuries.
"The very same olive-wood rafters supported the roof of my grandfather's house. Water was still gathered from the same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from the same kind of boat ... For the people who lived off the main routes, history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the environment was still in the commons. People lived in houses they had built; moved on streets that had been trampled by the feet of their animals; were autonomous in the procurement and disposal of their water; could depend on their own voices."
All this changed in 1926, the year of Illich's birth. The same ship that brought the infant to be blessed by his grandfather carried the first loudspeaker ever heard on the island. "Up to that day," Illich has written, "all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices ... Henceforth access to the microphone would determine whose voice [would] be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete."
By 1938 Illich already knew in his bones that the world into which he had been born was vanishing. Soon he would become a wanderer through the uncanny landscapes generated by the loudspeaker's many progeny. But he did not lose his tap-root into the soil of old Europe or his family's ancient affiliation with the Roman Church. He took this fading world within himself where it would nourish a stance so radically traditional that for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s excited North American audiences thought it avant garde.
Illich discussing his origins:
CAYLEY: Where did you grow up?
ILLICH: Because I supposedly created difficulties for my mother, threatening her with my arrival, she was taken to the best doctors, who at that moment sat in Vienna, Austria. My father was not then living in central Europe. So I was born in Vienna. Then, at the age of three months, I was exported, with my nurse, to Dalmatia to be shown to my grandfather and to be baptized, there, in Split, on Vidovdan, the Day of Great Liberation, the first of December. There I grew up, spending a part of the year in Dalmatia, a part with the other grandparent in Vienna, and a part of the year in France or wherever my parents were.
Then, during the later 1930s, my place of ordinary residence was at the house of Grandfather in Vienna&emdash;where I got stuck as a half-Aryan with diplomatic protection - which being the son of my father afforded - to shelter my Jewish grandfather, until he died a natural death there in his own house in 1941. At that time, I ceased to be a half-Aryan and became a half-Jew, according to the law. We had to more or less go underground and slip out of what was then Germany. I spent the rest of my youth, from the age of fifteen, mainly in Italy, in Florence and Rome.
CAYLEY: With your parents?
ILLICH: No. My father was dead by then, and I took care of my mother and two smaller brothers, who are twins. They stayed in Florence. From 1951 on, I have been on this side of the ocean. Since I left the old house on the island in Dalmatia, I have never had a place which I called my home. I have always lived in a tent like the one in which you are sitting at this moment.
Next I was five years in New York, as a parish priest, working with Puerto Ricans on 175th Street. I was in Puerto Rico for five years, officially engaged in educational institutions. I was five years in Cuernavaca, Mexico, renting a big hotel from which we ran a modest political effort to upset volunteer programs for Latin America, from 1961 to 1966. From 1966 to 1976, I made possible this alternative university in Cuernavaca, the Center for Intercultural Documentation (ClDOC). This center lasted exactly ten years to the day, from April first to April first. It began with a big fools feast and ended with a dance. So that gives you my whereabouts.
CAYLEY: Your education was in Rome?
ILLICH: It still goes on.
CAYLEY: You said you were fortunate in having only sporadic schooling.
ILLICH: I registered for purely practical reasons in chemistry, and finished in crystallography in Florence.
CAYLEY: What was practical about that?
ILLICH: I got legitimacy by obtaining an ID card, which provided me with a false identity, under the Fascists. It was one little tool which was useful. Later, I seriously studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University, in Rome. I also did a doctorate in history in Salzburg. Right after the war, I got stuck in Salzburg. I wanted a residence permit, and my lawyer advised me that the best thing would be to register at the university. So I went there in order to maintain my legitimacy, and then got fascinated with two professors, Professor Albert Auer and Professor Michel Muechlin, who became my great teachers in historical method and in the interpretation of old texts.
Illich on Education:
CAYLEY: What was the origin of Deschooling Society? Did you begin as a conventional believer in schooling?
ILLICH: No, I considered that school met the needs of others. I had been brought up without much schooling. At the age of six, when my normal languages were French and Italian and German, my mother wanted to put me in a school in Vienna, a very good school where they already gave tests to children. They found that I was a retarded child. That was a great advantage for me because for two years I could sit in my grandmother's library and read her novels and look up all the interesting things that might intrigue a nasty boy of seven in the dictionaries. Yes, I went to school, but only by bits.
Practically everything I learned occurred outside of school. But I also never made an issue of schooling. So when in 1956 I suddenly found myself the vice-rector of the Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and, a year later, a member of the government's Board of All Education, the Consejo Superior de Ensenanza, governing everything from the universities to grade schools, I couldn't but ask myself, "What is this stuff about education?" I had never really reflected on it. You met up with me when for ten years I had been trying to puzzle out what the whole thing meant.
CAYLEY: And why did you conclude that it didn't make sense?
ILLICH: I first concluded that it was structured injustice to compel people to go to school and only then began to reflect whether it made any sense. On that road, the meeting with Everett Reimer was important for me. A good fifteen years older than I, Everett at that time - 1956 - was chairman of the Human Resources Planning Commission. I met him soon after I arrived at a meeting of top administrators on how to organize planning to design education. Bottles are designed. Packages for bras are designed. How to design education and how universities should collaborate in making design into a subject were the issues on that day.
Most of my life is really the result of meeting the right person at the right moment and being befriended by him. This was the case with Everett. But I was confused by his title - planning - a word I had never used before. I looked it up in dictionaries and didn't find it. It appeared for the first time in dictionaries after World War II. Human resources was another issue. How do you make human beings - these Puerto Rican jibaritos with whom I was dealing - human resources? I remember on my next trip to New York going to Princeton to see Jacques Maritain, the philosopher, who was then living there. We had met up in Rome in a seminar and he had become a dear friend and advisor. His imaginative Thomism meant a lot to me. He was then an old man with a face, as Ann Freemantle once said, cut from a stained glass window in Chartres. In 1957, I was now sitting there with him again. He had a teacup in his hand and was shaking when I talked to him about the question which bothered me, that in all his philosophy I didn't find any access to the concept of planning. He asked me if this was an English word for accounting, and I told him no ... if it was for engineering, and I said no ... and then at a certain moment he said to me, "Ah! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends." Now I finally understand. "C'est une nouvelle espèce du pêche de presomption." Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.
It was along this kind of circuitous road that I came to understand what this educational system of Puerto Rico was doing. First, thanks to years of conversation with Everett, I read my way into the pragmatists and empiricists of the English tradition of thinkers and philosophers. Second, I asked myself, what do schools do when I put into parentheses their claim to educate? Perhaps only in that way will I find out what they do. They then had a machine which was called a computer. It had nothing to do with what you see around now, but could already gobble up so-called data and organize them. So I was in a position to ask for data. When I looked at the printouts they gave me, it was quite evident that after ten years of intensive development (another one of these words!) of the school system in the country, which at that moment was, together with Israel, the showcase for development all over the world, schooling in Puerto Rico was so arranged that half the students - that half which came from the poorer families - had a one-in-three chance of finishing five years of elementary education, the amount which was compulsory.
Most of the discussion around me was about immediately making many more years of education compulsory. Nobody faced the fact that schooling served, at least in Puerto Rico, to compound the native poverty of half of the children with a new interiorized sense of guilt for not having made it. I therefore came to the conclusion that schools inevitably are a system to produce dropouts, and to produce more dropouts than successes. Because the school is open for sixteen years, eighteen years, nineteen years of schooling and never closes the door on anybody, it will always produce a few successes and a majority of failures. In the minds of the people who financed and engineered them, schools were established to increase equality. I discovered that they really acted as a lottery system in which those who didn't make it didn't just lose what they had paid in but were also stigmatized as inferior for the rest of their lives.
CAYLEY: That was what impressed me when I taught in the school system of Sarawak in East Malaysia. At that time there were no more than a handful of people who were going on to university in Moscow or at the University of British Columbia. And yet the whole country was entering the primary grades, and aspirations were being focussed at least at the level of graduation from high school. So it only took a nudge from you for me to recognize that this extraordinarily steep pyramid constituted a kind of rationale for failure.
ILLICH: Don't you think that by now you have to be a little bit benighted, silly, or high with some dreams about your society not to know these things? Then it was really a surprise for people. Today I can't surprise anybody with the evidence - which has remained the same. I think the idea that schooling leads to an education went out during the 1970s, but in the 1960s and especially in the 1950s you were really treated like a skunk, like a criminal, when you questioned this. Things have changed.
CAYLEY: But they've changed in such an odd way. In the early 1970s, when your views on schooling had a brief vogue, everyone seemed to agree with you. But fifteen years later ...
ILLICH: Nothing has changed.
CAYLEY: Well, something presumably has changed, but it hasn't changed in the direction of deschooling.
ILLICH: But the deschooling I meant was the disestablishment of schools. I never wanted to do away with schools. I simply said, "We live under the American constitution - I spoke to Americans - and in the American constitution you have developed the concept of the disestablishment of churches. You disestablish by not paying public monies. I called for a disestablishment of schools in that sense. I suggested that instead of financing schools, you should go a little bit further than you went with religion and have schools pay taxes so that schooling would become a luxury object and be recognized as such. In that way discrimination because of lack of schooling would be at least legally discontinued in the same way that discrimination because of race or sex has been made illegal.
CAYLEY: In asking for disestablishment and by using the language that was used historically to separate church and state, you imply that schooling has in effect become a new form of compulsory religion.
ILLICH: Perhaps I have to explain how I got to my analysis of schooling. I told you what led me into it practically: I was responsible for making or presiding over very serious decisions and the creation of legislation touching the education of Puerto Rico. So I had to reflect, What am I doing? And it seemed to me quite clear that I was acting within a context that seemed ridiculously similar to a religious one. So I began to speak intuitively about the disestablishment of schooling. Later on I made much more of a point of this, because I actually treated the school system as a continuation of the Christian church system in Western culture.
When, under the influence of Everett Reimer, I began to engage in a phenomenology of schooling, I first asked myself, What am I studying? Quite definitely, I was not studying what other people told me this was, namely, the most practical arrangement for imparting education, or for creating equality, because I saw that most of the people were stupefied by this procedure, were actually told that they couldn't learn on their own and became disabled and crippled. Secondly, I had the evidence that it promoted a new kind of self-inflicted injustice. So I said to myself, Let me define as schooling the compulsory attendance in groups of no more than fifty and no less than fifteen, of age-specific cohorts of young people around one person called a teacher, who has more schooling than they. And then I asked myself, What kind of a liturgy is used there to generate the belief that this is a social enterprise that has some kind of autonomy from the law?
CAYLEY: And?
ILLICH: I came to the conclusion that this was a mythopoetic ritual. Gluckman, who was my hero at that time, says that rituals are forms of behavior that make those who participate in them blind to the discrepancy which exists between the purpose for which you perform the rain dance, and the actual social consequences the rain dance has. If the rain dance doesn't work, you can blame yourself for having danced it wrongly.
Schooling, I increasingly came to see, is the ritual of a society committed to progress and development. It creates certain myths which are a requirement for a consumer society. For instance, it makes you believe that learning can be sliced up into pieces and quantified, or that learning is something for which you need a process within which you acquire it. And in this process you are the consumer and somebody else the organizer, and you collaborate in producing the thing which you consume and interiorize. This is all basic for being a modern man and living in the absurdities of the modern world.
CAYLEY: These were your observations of schools in the 1960s. Would this have been true of schools a hundred years before, or was this a new phenomenon?
ILLICH: It would be easier for me to go a little bit further back. Recently, I supervised somebody doing an interesting thesis on about 120 pietists in Germany who wrote diaries in the later seventeenth century. Now this person observed that these pietists who wrote the diaries were very simple people, and began to study how many months they had attended a village school - which was certainly before the little red schoolhouse. It turned out that with three exceptions, these 120 had learned all they got from school in less then eleven months of attendance. They didn't go to school to get an education. They went to school to learn how to hold the pen. I can talk in the same way about the Middle Ages. The idea that you go to school to get an education develops very slowly. I always said it begins with Comenius, who says that everybody must be taught everything perfectly so that he doesn't pick it up badly outside of school.
The idea that competence in the world derives from being instructed about it, taught about it, is an idea which from the seventeenth century on slowly takes over. In fact, the social effects of schooling which I spoke about became possible in Puerto Rico only with the idea of universal compulsory schooling. I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling. Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks which a person might propose to himself. Schools, when they are compulsory - as we see at this moment in the United States - create a dazed population, a "learned" population, a mentally pretentious population, such as we have never seen before. The last fifty years of intensive improvement of schooling - here, or in Germany, or in France - have created television consumers.
We live in a strange society in which people believe that they act on empirical evidence. But the empirical evidence, in relation to schooling, is quite obvious and not only with respect to justice. Since that excellent book by Ivar Berg, The Great Training Robbery, which was given to me by Paul Goodman, many similar studies have been done. Berg shows you that there is absolutely no connection between the subjects people have learned in school and the effectiveness of those people in jobs requiring preparation in those subjects. There is a very close connection between how much money has been spent on a person's schooling and the total life-long income which he'll get on the job, but no provable relationship between the competence he is supposed to have acquired in school and his effectiveness on the job.
CAYLEY: So schooling is a form of capital investment in which the return is proportional to the investment, regardless of competence.
ILLICH: Yes. Nobody doubts that. It's capital investment, but it's also social control, it's grading, it's the creation of a class society consisting of sixteen levels of fewer and fewer dropouts. But these are things that then interested me. I somehow have the impression that, even though not much has changed in the general commitment of our society to schooling, there are thousands of people around who see clearly, with truly wise and cynical eyes, what the institution does. Today, I would be interested in completely different questions.
CAYLEY: When you wrote about this in 1970, you suggested that things would have to change, and when they did, they would change quickly.
ILLICH: I was wrong. At least in the time frame, I was wrong. I did not believe that so many people could be so tolerant of nonsense. Now that I'm back in the United States after twenty-five years and again have to do with student populations, I sometimes am so sad in the evening that I have difficulty falling asleep. The college and university systems have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand. It creates students who have gotten utterly used to the fact that what they learn they must be taught, and nothing they are taught must really be taken seriously.
The first person who told me I was wrong and would be proven wrong was Wolfgang Sachs. He was a student of mine. In Germany, I met with him and a small group of other students, then in their mid-twenties, who criticized the articles collected in Deschooling Society. They claimed that by making so much of the unwanted side-effects of compulsory schooling, I had become blind to the fact that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory, not by law, but by other tricks like making people believe that they are learning something from TV or compelling people to attend in-service training, or getting people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to prepare better for intercourse, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins which they need, how to play games, and so on. They made me understand that my criticism of schooling in Deschooling Society might have helped people like yourself to reflect but that I was barking up the wrong tree and that I should ask myself: How can we better understand the fact that societies get addicted - as to a drug - to education?
Then, during the 1970s, most of my thinking and reflection centered on the question, How should I distinguish the acquisition of education from the fact that people have always known many things, have had many competencies and, therefore, have learned something? So I then came to define education as learning under the assumption of scarcity, learning under the assumption that the means for acquiring something called knowledge are scarce. At this point my reflections were no longer rabble-rousing and nobody on campus discussed them. Years later, I see only a little ripple of response here and there.
From there I was led to my project since the mid-1970s of writing a history of the perception of scarcity. I asked the question, "Which are the conditions under which the very idea of education can arise?" You can't have the modern idea of education if you don't believe there is knowledge - knowledge which can be packaged, knowledge which can be defined, knowledge which constitutes a value which can be appropriated. I therefore became concerned with the mental frame or space within which the concepts by which we construct the notion of education can take shape.
CAYLEY: You remark in Limits to Medicine that, if your critique of medicine is taken as an attack on doctors, the result will be analogous to what has already happened in the matter of schooling. Were you saying that because your attack was understood to be on schools, this actually helped the school to reconsolidate itself as a sort of universal schoolroom?
ILLICH: Correct.
CAYLEY: And this is what you feel you didn't see at the time you published Deschooling Society.
ILLICH: I did not see it when I wrote the article called "The Futility of Schooling in Latin America," which the Saturday Review published. Three years later, six articles of mine were put together in that book, Deschooling Society. The book was nine months at Harper's, because it takes nine months for a good book to go through its gestation period. During the last month, the prepublication month, I suddenly realized the unwanted side-effects the publication of my book could have. So I went to the editor of Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, a friend of my neighbor and friend Erich Fromm, and said, "Norman, would you kindly allow me to publish an article during the next month?"
"Yes," he answered, "but only if you write it in such a way that we can make it the lead article." So I wrote an article in which I basically said that nothing would be worse than to believe that I consider schools the only technique for creating and establishing and anchoring in souls the myth of education. There are many other ways by which we can make the world into a universal classroom. And Cousins was so kind as to allow me to publish what I consider the main criticism of my book.
CAYLEY: There have been many criticisms of Deschooling. I remember one by Herb Gintis, in the Harvard Educational Review, which I think typified a Marxist critique of your work. Gintis says that you have made schooling a matter of an initiation into the myth of unending consumption, but you have overlooked the way it is a mirror of the productive system. You have made people responsible for their own deschooling when in fact they are behaving rationally and appropriately within the system as a whole, and therefore you're giving them a counsel of despair. Because, he says, unless they can transform the system it's impossible for them to deschool, since the school is intrinsic to the system. That's a very rough paraphrase.
ILLICH: To Mr. Gintis I would have said, "You are worried because the poorer part of Americans - at that time, the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the ghettos - don't get enough schooling to know what's good for them and so remain independent. Poor people drop out of school before they can fall into your hands and be told that you know what's good for them." But I had literally hundreds of critics. John Ohliger collected three volumes of citations of these criticisms and discussions. And in all that stuff there was no attention to the only two chapters I wanted to have discussed, "The Ritualization of Progress" and "The Rebirth of Epimethean Man."
CAYLEY: In your book, Gender, you say that you could not have written either that book or Deschooling Society without the work of Philippe Aries.
ILLICH: It is through Aries that I was introduced to the historicity of the notion of "the child," and that in this sense it is a modern construct. I probably fell for Aries because I had always disliked it when the children of my friends would take the attitude "I'm a child and you must pay attention to me." Since I was fifteen, I had refused to notice or to enter into any kind of intercourse with such a person. Some of my friends, better friends, family friends, have considered me all my life a brute. But an interesting thing has happened a number of times. When these kids had difficulties with their parents, they suddenly appeared on my doorstep - at age fourteen or fifteen. In two cases, they came to another continent, seeking refuge. My intuition is that one of the most evil things our modern society does is produce children in this specifically modern sense. As a young man, I decided that I wouldn't do that. That was the reason I decided at age twelve not to marry.
CAYLEY: To stay with childhood for a moment - does identifying it as a specifically modern idea invalidate it? Is it not also in some sense an advance?
ILLICH: It's just that with all advances, the greater they are, the more they are an extreme form of privilege. We are sitting here and having this conversation together because I was, at one glance, so impressed by the feeling between you and your children, whom you have kept out of school. Now for them, the fact that you have abandoned the idea of childhood in order to take these kids who live in a world of childhood fully seriously as kids is an extraordinary advantage. But this is not a model. This is something to be emulated, not imitated. It's the spark of uniqueness that must be cherished.
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